hdparm
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hdparm is a command line utility to set and view hardware parameters of hard disk drives. It can also be used as a simple benchmarking tool.
Contents
Installation
hdparm can be installed from the official repositories. For use with SCSI devices, install sdparm.
Usage
Disk info
To get information about your hard disk, run the following:
# hdparm -I /dev/sda
Benchmarking
See Benchmarking/Data storage devices.
Power management configuration
Modern hard drives support numerous power management features, the most common ones are summarized in the following table. See hdparm(8)
for the complete list.
Parameter | Description |
---|---|
-B |
Set the Advanced Power Management feature. Possible values are between 1 and 255, low values mean more aggressive power management and higher values mean better performance. Values from 1 to 127 permit spin-down, whereas values from 128 to 254 do not. A value of 255 completely disables the feature. |
-S |
Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. The timeout specifies how long to wait in idle (with no disk activity) before turning off the motor to save power. The value of 0 disables spindown, the values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds and values from 241 to 251 specify multiples of 30 minutes. |
-M |
Set the Automatic Acoustic Management feature. Most modern hard disk drives have the ability to speed down the head movements to reduce their noise output. The possible value depends on the disk, some disks may not support this feature. |
To query current value, pass the parameter without a value. For example:
# hdparm -B /dev/sda
To apply different value, for example set APM to 127:
# hdparm -B 127 /dev/sda
Persistent configuration using udev rule
To make the setting persistent, adapt the following udev rule for your values:
/etc/udev/rules.d/50-hdparm.rules
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="sda", RUN+="/usr/bin/hdparm -B 254 -S 0 /dev/sda"
If you have more than one hard drive you could make the rule more flexible. For example, to apply power-saving settings for all external drives (assuming there is only one internal drive, /dev/sda
):
/etc/udev/rules.d/50-hdparm.rules
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[b-z]", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="1", RUN+="/usr/bin/hdparm -B 127 -S 12 /dev/%k"
Tips and tricks
KDE => 4.4.4 and hdparm
To stop KDE version 4.4.4 or greater from messing around with your (manually) configured hdparm values, enter the following and you should be done:
# touch /etc/pm/power.d/harddrive
Troubleshooting
APM level reset after suspend
The APM level may get reset after a suspend, so you will probably also have to re-execute the command after each resume. This can be automated with the following systemd unit: (adapted from a forum thread)
[Unit] Description=Local system resume actions After=sleep.target [Service] Type=simple ExecStart=/usr/bin/hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda [Install] WantedBy=sleep.target
Or you could create /usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep/hdparm_set
: found here
#!/bin/sh hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
And make it executable:
chmod +x /usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep/hdparm_set